New Years blog

I hope you've all had a good start to the new year.

In this post, I will write a little about the year that passed, and talk about what we are going to do next.

Upgrades

The biggest job in 2022 was to upgrade our framework, introduce new technical tools, and gain experience in using them.

It was a huge task, because Virtual Manager has many years behind it, and it's quite a job to make over 15-year-old code work with the latest versions.

This meant that there hasn't been much time left over to make new features in the game. That's a shame, but that's just the reality of things. If we had built a lot of new stuff on top of the old platform, it would have meant a lot of wasted work that would have to be redone later.

We divided the work into a couple of parts. We started in January by upgrading our framework, Rails, from version 5.2 to 6.0, followed by 6.1 and then 7.0. We also upgraded Ruby to 3.0 and 3.1.

This work took several months, and once we had that done with, I felt it was time for a break from upgrades, so we then started work on the new sponsor system.

After the sponsor system, we continued with a new round of upgrades. This time the jobs was to integrate a number of new tools, which the above mentioned upgrades made possible.

New sponsorship system

The biggest new feature in 2022 was the new sponsorship system.

It was quite clear that the old sponsorship system needed a refresh. It was a part of the game that the majority of clubs never used, probably because it was boring and obscure to sit there and enter numbers into a form without really knowing what it was all about. The new system has significantly better gameplay, and a visual boost with new sponsors and logos for all of them.

And the new sponsorship system has definitely been a success: There are over 7x as many clubs with sponsorship agreements now than there were before we launched the new system!

The New Year's game

I'm always busy in December, but this time I have been extra busy as I have been alone at the helm. Both of my employees have been away due to vacation and leave, from mid-November and the beginning of December respectively.

Unfortunately, this meant that I didn't manage to get the new Christmas game out to you before the Christmas holidays. That was a shame, but as I have mentioned, the main purpose of the Christmas game was to be a test bed for the many new tools we will start using. Putting it out as a Christmas game was just an added bonus, and in the hustle and bustle, the daily tasks of Virtual Manager took higher priority.

But, of course, we still had both the World Cup 2022 Betting game and our Advent calendar to enjoy ourselves with in December.

Over the course of the next week, however, I expect that I'll be able to find some free time and get the game up and running - and after that we will continue to use it as a test platform for new things in the coming year.

2023

From next week everyone will be back at work again. Fortunately, there won't be any more major software upgrades in 2023, so we can now get started on the mobile friendly version that I've been talking about for a long time. In addition, we will also start work on a new employee system, which I have written about before.

At the moment, I can't say exactly what order things will come in. My guess is that we will start by redesigning a number of the most important and most visited pages, and then make the new employee system - which will of course mobile-friendly from the start.